Palm Beach resident donates sculpture for Norton Museum’s entrance

Monday

Jan 29, 2018 at 12:01 AMJan 29, 2018 at 7:19 PM

In the not too distant future people might say "Turn at the big eraser" when directing visitors to the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach.

It’ll be difficult to miss the 19-foot-4-inch tall Typewriter Eraser, Scale X standing jauntily in the reflecting pool outside what will become the museum’s new entrance on Dixie Highway when its expansion is completed in December.

Ronnie Heyman and her late husband, Samuel, commissioned Claes Oldenburg’s 19-foot-4-inch tall Typewriter Eraser, Scale X for the sculpture garden of their home in Connecticut. Photo by Paul McDermott Photography

The sculpture by pop artist Claes Oldenburg and his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen, is a gift from resident Ronnie Heyman, a Norton board member and modern and contemporary art collector who also has donated $5 million to the museum’s $100 million capital campaign. The work will be installed in a plaza named after Heyman and her late husband, Samuel.

Heyman gave museum staff a choice of several large-scale works from the sculpture garden of her home in Connecticut.

At first, they selected a piece by minimalist sculptor Tony Smith.

Heyman preferred the piece by Oldenburg, a pop artist known for bringing a sense of whimsy to public art. The sculpture’s bright colors and the sweep of its blue brushes extending from the red eraser wheel will stand out, she said. "I thought it would be eye-catching on Dixie Highway in front of this Norman Foster pure white and steel building."

Plans call for Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X to be positioned in the reflecting pool in the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Plaza at the Norton Museum’s new entrance on Dixie Highway. Courtesy of Foster + Partners

The work charmed passersby who spotted it on her lawn in Connecticut and sent notes thanking her for sharing it. Many were too young to know what it was. The likely curiosity the work will evoke was another point in its favor.

Lord Norman Foster, architect of the expansion, agreed with Heyman.

Foster traveled from London in December so that he and Heyman could decide exactly where to place the work with the help of a full-scale mock-up. It will stand off-center in the reflecting pool, which Foster is enlarging a bit, and will look as though it’s floating on the surface of the water.

The plaza, with its sweeping canopy, provides visitors’ first impression of the museum and sets the stage for what they’ll experience inside. "There is a careful play and interaction between the work of art, the water feature, with the soft reflections of light on the canopy and the bench," Foster said.

The sculpture and the big banyan tree flanking the plaza on the north are the "protagonists" of the ensemble, he said.

Hope Alswang, the museum’s executive director and chief executive officer, readily conceded. "I realized they were right," she said. "Everybody would say ‘Have you seen the big eraser?’ I realized it would be a real symbol of the museum. This ironic and amusing object would become a real landmark."

Heyman and her husband commissioned a large-scale version of the piece, of which there are smaller versions in other museum collections, in 1999. Other works from the large-scale edition are in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the Seattle Center in Washington state.

"You can’t do much better in terms of a major piece of American sculpture," Alswang said.

For Heyman, the sculpture is "a compelling symbol of where I as a trustee would like to see the Norton go for its next iteration," she said. "I feel the Norman Foster building is a game-changer and a direction-changer."